Episode

Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Podcast
New Books in Literary Studies
Published
Aug 12, 2026
Duration seconds
3084
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9884176331.mp3
Audio
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9884176331.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/episodes/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025
Markdown
/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025.md

Actions

  • POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/episodes/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025/transcription-requests
    Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
  • GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025.md
    Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

Summary

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies